I am an associate at Thiel Capital and the VP of Grants for the Thiel Foundation, where I help run the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship. Before my academic apostasy, I was working towards a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. I have written on innovation and technological change for MIT’s Technology Review, the Atlantic and Fast Company. I live and work in San Francisco.

The City As Startup

Detroit appears to be in hospice. The city’s bankruptcy in July unleashed a torrent of commentary on the origins and causes of its decline. It could have been the cold. No universities. It could have been corruption. No creative class. It could have been a brittle dependence on an auto industry now hollowed out. The striking thing is that it is not uncommon to hear people discussing an event that neither nuclear bombs nor natural disasters nor communism could completely bring about: the death of a city. The search for an underlying cause is pressing because Detroit is not alone in this struggle. To varying degrees, cities around the U.S. continue to muddle their way through a slow economic recovery.

Hence the prevailing question of our urban era: can governments or other influential actors coax new life into an ailing city?

Last week at the SXSW V2V conference in Las Vegas, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, gave a keynote speech entitled “The City as Startup.” (You can watch it here.) He detailed the Downtown Project, his $350 million program to revitalize the urban core of Las Vegas north of the main strip. Within five years, the project aims to invest in companies and the community: $200 million in real estate and housing; $50 million in education, arts, and culture; $50 million in small businesses; and $50 million in tech startups. Zappos will also move its corporate headquarters from nearby Henderson to the old Las Vegas city hall.

Hsieh is certainly not the first to pursue such a plan for a struggling city (though he may be the first to personally bankroll one). On the promise of job creation and economic dynamism, city governments elsewhere have attempted to spark high-tech innovation hubs into being out of the ether. The most successful of the bunch, such as Silicon Alley in New York City and Silicon Roundabout in London, are buoyed by city economies already teeming with activity and attractions. Other conspicuous efforts to start from scratch, as in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE and Skolkovo in Moscow, have yet to become self-sustaining.

It’s an open question where Las Vegas falls into this mix.

In between sessions at SXSW V2V, I went on a tour of the Downtown Project that included a walk through Hsieh’s apartment. He lives at the top of a building near Fremont Street called the Ogden, which serves as a sort of dorm, office, and hub for many in the community. When you first walk into Hsieh’s apartment, there’s a long hallway with two racks along the wall. He places some of the books he is inspired by facing front cover out on the rack.

The most prominent one among them is The Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard whose research focuses on the life and death of cities. The key stat in the book that Hsieh and others on the project refer to is resident density per acre. The most prosperous cities, according to the team, have about 100 residents per acre; downtown Las Vegas currently has about fourteen per acre. Of course, it’s a long way to go by that metric, but the project is in its infancy. One hundred Teslas for ride shares, daily public lectures, a children’s school specializing in creativity and entrepreneurship, gastro pubs, co-working spaces, a concert series, a “container park” flanked by a flaming praying mantis—all of these represent an auspicious, if eccentric beginning.

Like many institutions, cities are born, not made. They rise from obscure origins, flourish, last longer than any other man-made system, and sometimes, although rarely, fold back into themselves and pass away. A city is a chaotic, out of control, complex adaptive system. And yet, with more than eighty percent of Americans living in urban areas, the city is also the fundamental political unit of the future. People will continue to try to blend the grown and the manufactured, mixing what we can design with what must emerge. Hsieh and company are showing we can also have fun while trying to manage it.

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